CATHEDRAL'S LATE SERVICE IS BEST

There's no clock in baseball, but there is one at Yankee Stadium. It read 12:47 EDT when Scott Kazmir started to warm up for his All-Star Game appearance.

Kazmir, a left-hander from the Tampa Bay Rays, had been visiting with nearby fans and a police officer in the deserted American League bullpen for almost an hour as Baltimore's George Sherrill did what pitchers had been doing for most of Tuesday night: wiggling out of perilous situations.

He hadn't expected to get in the game, as he had thrown 104 pitches Sunday, when the free-falling Rays lost their seventh game in a row, but Kazmir - the 22nd of the game's 23 pitchers - would wind up as the winning pitcher when Minnesota's Justin Morneau slid into home plate a nanosecond ahead of the tag from Atlanta's Brian McCann.

With its 15-inning, 4-3 victory, the American League beat the National League, as it always does. But this time it did so only after baseball's lesser league had put up a fight worthy of the location, a place the game's commissioner, Bud Selig, calls "our greatest sports cathedral."

This was the longest All-Star Game ever, an epic running 4 hours, 50 minutes, but it was so much more.

It was dozens upon dozens of scintillating confrontations between excellent players - in a few cases, as when Ichiro Suzuki threw out Albert Pujols trying to stretch a single into a double, great players - in front of 55,632 passionate fans on an ideal summer night. It was a showcase that would have been unimaginable when Selig was forced to declare the 2002 All-Star Game in Milwaukee a tie after 11 sloppy innings.

In the words of Clint Hurdle, the Rockies manager who had hoped to bring the NL its first win since 1996, "It got a little wild."

Hurdle and Boston manager Terry Francona used all 63 of their able-bodied players, the only noncombatant being young San Francisco pitcher Tim Lincecum, who had been hospitalized after experiencing dehydration. Since the embarrassing tie in 2002, Selig has required the teams to have 12 pitchers each among the All-Stars, yet even that number almost wasn't enough.

Hurdle had told Mets third baseman David Wright that he would have to pitch if Philadelphia's Brad Lidge had to come out of the game - a distinct possibility if it went much longer. Everyone knew there would be no tie declared this time. The teams were playing to win.

The game might still be considered an exhibition game, but it clearly will be a long time before it again is played as one.

Florida Marlins second baseman Dan Uggla certainly didn't consider it a throwaway experience. He was trying his hardest to show why he'd been picked as an All-Star but couldn't do anything right.

He botched three ground balls for errors and almost was stuck with another one before desperately retrieving his bobble and firing to first base. He struck out in the eighth, 12th and 15th innings and hit into a rally-killing double play in the 10th.

"That was a rough one, I'm not going to lie," Uggla said.

"Sometimes it's not your night. Tonight wasn't my night."

It would not have been right for Uggla to be remembered as a goat in a game like this. After all, his grounder could have put the NL ahead if not for a perfectly turned double play by second baseman Ian Kinsler and shortstop Michael Young, teammates who have been working together three years for the Texas Rangers.

There were seven stolen bases in the game, an All-Star record, six of them by an out-of-character AL team. Yet the game wouldn't have made it past the 11th inning if the Dodgers' Russell Martin hadn't fired a strike to second base to nip Kinsler on a call by umpire Tom Hallion that could have gone the other way.

A few minutes later Martin tagged Dioner Navarro at the plate on a play that forced umpire Derryl Cousins to make an equally difficult call.

Navarro was out because of a precise throw from Pittsburgh center fielder Nate McLouth. The play could have been an All-Star classic had the AL pitchers not held the NL hitters scoreless in the last seven innings.

Sherrill, the Orioles closer in the midst of a career season, worked 2 1/3 innings, equaling the longest of his 238 big-league outings. Along with Ryan Dempster, Brandon Webb and Kazmir, he pushed himself beyond the level that has become the industry standard in the modern game.

Dempster struck out Kinsler, Navarro and J.D. Drew (the eventual MVP) in order in the ninth. What a game.

"It was everything I thought it would be and more," Longoria said. "Two hours more."